Ralph Berrier
Page 20
“Thou shalt not kill,” so goes the sixth commandment, which even a bastard boy from The Hollow knew to be the God’s-honest truth. But “Thou shalt not kill” doesn’t mean what it says. The correct and proper translation, according to the scholars who know their Greek and their Hebrew (which I don’t), should have been “Thou shalt not murder,” which is a whole different ball game. Murder is when you kill somebody who doesn’t deserve it, and we all know the enemy deserved it, whether they were Japanese or German. My grandpappy wasn’t no murderer, my generation says. He was a damn hero. If you say different, this means war.
And war means this: Thou has to kill. It’s the only commandment to live by.
Clayton’s battalion took the hill.
• • •
If there is such a thing as drudgery in war, F Company was right in the thick of it. Move forward. Kill the enemy. Dig a foxhole. Repeat. This was the “mopping-up” phase, which means slaughtering the enemy until there’s not enough of him left to clean up with a mop. When it wasn’t fighting, Clayton’s company dug muddy roads through the mountains, and the engineers built bridges in a combined effort to move troops more quickly to places where enemies needed to be mopped up. As they dug and dragged, the men of F Company occasionally stumbled upon enemy pillboxes, which they mopped up with explosives, the biggest mop of all.
Filipino boys brought them food and supplies on the backs of lumbering carabao, enormous bovine-like creatures that resembled oxen to a boy from The Hollow who could still see the farmers plowing fields in preparation for corn and tobacco planting. Leyte, however, hardly seemed suitable for any kind of life to flourish.
A wholly different enemy also attacked the men in Leyte’s steaming jungles—disease. Dengue fever, dysentery, jungle rot, and other tropical afflictions had felled thousands of soldiers, their bodies drenched with feverish sweats, blood occasionally running from their noses. The sickness and death of Leyte made it one of the biggest hellholes on earth.
In early November 1944, the entire 382nd Infantry Regiment had been taken off the front line—except for Clayton’s battalion, the Second. Clayton and his buddies patrolled the hills for weeks, right up until Thanksgiving, when a shipment of canned turkey arrived on sleds pulled by carabao and horses. The thought of a prospective feast was mouthwatering, even if it was just turkey in a can. The stuff had spoiled, however. They buried the thermal canisters of rotten meat and sat down to a meal of C rations and were glad to have it. They had much to be thankful for. They were alive.
• • •
F Company had been on the front line for fifty days. Whenever possible, the men shed their muddy, stinking, wet uniforms and bathed in mountain streams. They were badly in need of a break, but once again they were called out to fight. Japanese ground forces and paratroopers had attacked an American airfield near the small town of Burauen in a daring nighttime attack in the early hours of December 7, 1944, the third anniversary of Pearl Harbor.
The fighting was under way by the time Clayton’s men arrived. It looked like a mob brawl. Both sides were confused amid the chaos. Japanese soldiers attacked while wearing American uniforms they had peeled from the backs of dead soldiers. Initially, the airfield’s only defenders were a ragtag assortment of American engineers, clerks, and truck drivers, who at one point fought off 150 drunken Japanese attackers. Some airfield defenders were killed by their own .50-caliber machine guns, which had either been commandeered by the Japanese or had been mistakenly turned on Americans by Americans. Nobody ever knew for sure.
F Company joined the fight and swiftly helped regain the airfield. Once again, flares illuminated the night sky, giving the Americans a clear view of the rattled, desperate enemy, which F Company annihilated. The Japanese were almost finished on Leyte. Out at sea, the U.S. Navy destroyed the mighty Japanese fleet, despite the brand-new Japanese tactic of airborne kamikaze attacks. Other divisions had won their battles all across Leyte, just like the Deadeyes. The Japanese wasted so many resources—so many lives—in a failed mission to stave off the Americans that they drained their defenses for the rest of the Philippines. The islands of Luzon and Samar would soon fall into American hands, and the Philippines would become the staging ground for the war’s eventual climactic fights. Although the war was far from over, dusk was approaching for the empire of the rising sun.
On December 25, 1944, MacArthur declared that all organized resistance on Leyte had ended. Men celebrated with Christmas feasts of beer and C rations. The crack of a rifle sent men scrambling, thinking a Japanese sniper was still on the loose. Turned out it was Captain Barron killing a wild boar, which the company cooks roasted and sliced for a well-earned holiday meal. Somebody did the math and figured that F Company had been on the front line for sixty-six consecutive days. There was more grim arithmetic: twenty members of their company had been killed, nearly 10 percent of the two hundred or so who had landed on A-Day. Young men who had been with the outfit since Oregon were dead, but their names, faces, and voices were still fresh in the minds of their buddies.
War had been harder than anything they could have imagined or trained for. The war games near Bend, Oregon, seemed like a church picnic by comparison. They had seen their pals blown to pieces and had smelled the stench of rotting flesh. When they wrapped up their work on Leyte, the Deadeyes were more than battle-tested, they were cocky sons of bitches.
They must have known, however, that this was just the beginning. They were still far away from their ultimate destination—mainland Japan. If the Japanese had fought this ferociously to defend an island chain a thousand miles from home, how hard would they fight to protect their beaches, their cities, and their very homes?
• • •
When Clayton was an old man, I asked him about the injuries he sustained during the war.
“Well,” he said, then paused. “I was wounded in the Philippines.”
Message received. This is what happens when you win a war so your grandson will never be expected to fire a rifle at another human being. The grandson will grow up not knowing the difference between a wound and an injury. Injuries happen to rec-league softball players when they trip over second base. Soldiers are wounded. They are wounded by flying bullets and jagged pieces of metal from exploding shells. They are wounded by bayonets and trench knives. Their wounds are often gruesome, too horrible to look at, much less treat, which is why soldiers thanked God every day for the medics who saved life and limb by risking their own. When you’re wounded, you earn a medal that could fit in the palm of your hand. You get a tall trophy for rec-league softball. Hardly seems right.
Papa Clayton kept his Purple Heart pinned to his army jacket, that is until the day he pulled the jacket out of the closet and discovered it riddled with moth-eaten holes. This was about the same time he went looking for the copy of his discharge and found it torn to pieces and stuffed inside his daughter’s piggy bank. (This was also about the time my mother colored in Roy Rogers’s white cowboy hat with a pencil.) He mailed the ripped pieces to the army along with a letter explaining what his little girl had done and asked if the army might replace it with a duplicate. A few weeks later, the army mailed back his ripped-up copy—all taped together. (No telling how many American tax dollars were spent on the Army’s Department of Taping back in those days.) Clayton filed away his taped-up discharge and hung his medals and ribbons in a frame. His Purple Heart hung between his sergeant stripes and his Bronze Star. The frame also held his army portrait and the typewritten report of how he earned that Bronze Star, but that’s getting ahead of the story.
Clayton was wounded—the first time—the day after Christmas, twenty-four hours after Leyte was declared secure. Small teams continued to root out the last of the Japanese resistance. Clayton was on point of a three-man patrol. By the time I got around to asking him he had forgotten who was with him, maybe it was Humphries and Clark. What he remembered was the smell of “them high-powered Jap cigarettes,” probably opium, which some Japanese s
oldiers smoked to embolden themselves for battle and almost certain death. Clayton claimed he smelled smoke almost every time he came in close contact with the Japanese, which happened more frequently than he would have liked. As the patrol hacked its way through the thick jungles on northern Leyte, Clayton thought he smelled smoke—and where there’s funny-smellin’ smoke, there’s trouble.
He signaled the men behind him to stop. He turned to them and mouthed something about “smoke” and to be alert. He stepped forward and hacked a large banana stalk about waist-high with his machete. The top of the plant dropped straight down as if it had been sucked down a hole. In its place stood “The Story of How Papa Clayton Got Shot in the Head.”
The last thing Clayton remembered was the explosion of fire. He might have heard the noise from the machine gun, but he wasn’t sure. He remembered the flame, then waking up in a field hospital. What actually happened was easy to sort out, because his two witnesses survived.
Standing behind the banana stalk had been a Japanese soldier with a “grease gun,” a small, tommy-gun-like machine gun. The gunner opened up and expended most of a thirty-round clip right into Clayton’s helmet, which was really too big for his small head and always fell over his eyes and nearly sat on his shoulders. The bullets buzzed between the helmet and helmet liner like killer bees. Bullets spit out from the back and front, and the top of the helmet exploded as if a volcano had erupted. This entire horrifying episode took about three seconds, and Clayton remembered none of it.
Clayton awoke in the field hospital, seriously wounded. He had a good-sized gash on the top of his head, and his neck and chin were badly sliced up. One bullet had passed through his neck and barely missed his jugular. Incredibly, that was it. A machine-gun bluster of thirty bullets fired directly at his head had resulted in a nasty, but treatable, neck wound, a few bad cuts, and a bad headache. Talk about lucky.
Just before he was shipped out to a hospital in New Guinea, Clayton received a get-well present from his buddies—his shot-up helmet. It looked like someone had tossed a grenade in it. It was riddled with bumps and lumps that looked like goiters, and the top was completely blown out.
“What’d y’all do to my helmet?” Clayton asked groggily. “Boy, I’m gonna get whoever done that.”
“You don’t have to do anything,” one of his buddies assured him. “We made a good Jap out of him.”
• • •
Clayton didn’t keep the helmet, which was functionally useless. Its extra weight in a pack exceeded its sentimental value. He kept a photograph of it, but he lost it, so I never saw that picture. I saw the Purple Heart, though. It’s still in the frame where he hung it, right next to the Bronze Star and the photograph of him in his army uniform.
While traveling through this world of sorrow
I’m trusting Lord in thee
That I may safely meet each trial
Oh Lord, remember me
—“REMEMBER ME,” CLAYTON AND SAFORD’S FAVORITE GOSPEL NUMBER WITH THE BLUE RIDGE ENTERTAINERS
Half a world away in the Hürtgen Forest, mail service was spotty. If anyone tried to let Saford know his twin brother had been wounded, he never got the message. Besides, he had a little problem of his own that was more pressing.
The Go-Devils became the Slow-Devils during that grim fall and winter of 1944–45, when the war seemed to stop cold. The entire Ninth Infantry Division was repulsed at the Roer River, where three regiments tried and failed to take the dams. Up north, the British-planned Operation Market Garden had failed in its attempt to outflank the Germans in the Netherlands and northern Germany. It fell to the Ninth Division to attack the Germans in the well-shielded, mystical Hürtgen Forest.
The Hürtgen must have seemed like a setting from the Brothers Grimm, except that instead of teeming with witches and trolls, the forest was flush with Nazis and panzers. The evergreen canopy shrouded the terrain in eerie perpetual darkness. Tanks and artillery were rendered practically useless. Men trudged forward on foot, up the slippery banks and down narrow paths. Saford slogged through the woods in the unenviable search for enemy positions. He moved slowly, tree to tree, looking and listening for Germans.
The solitude of the forest was pierced by the high-pitched whine of incoming mortars. Saford and his men scattered and fell to the ground as branches snapped and shells exploded just yards in front of them. Saford picked himself out of the mud and skedaddled down a hill just as a machine gun opened up. Bullets peeled bark from conifer trees and showered him with dead needles. In barely a minute, he was separated from his squad. He dropped to his belly and crawled toward a streambed as more shells rained down. Saford nuzzled himself against an embankment and waited there for several minutes, which became an hour, which became several hours, which became all night.
At dawn’s first light, Saford arose from a sleepless night and climbed over the embankment above the streambed. He had lost his men and lost his way, mere yards from the German front. He took a minute to check his compass and get his bearings, then set out to find his outfit.
After several hours spent wandering in the woods, Saford was exhausted and starving. He had neither eaten nor slept in a day, and he was starting to hallucinate … perhaps the trolls and witches really would get him. Right around midday, he staggered into a sunlit clearing, where he saw a sad, gruesome sight: a dead American and a dead German lying just a few feet apart.
Saford walked over to the dead American and flipped him over. He felt around the dead man’s torso, looking not for his dog tags or a last letter home, but for food. By now, Saford had long since gotten over the shock and sentimentality of seeing a dead person. He was an animal now, a wild boar rooting around the woods to survive, even if it meant taking the C rations off a fallen comrade.
He peeled the lid off a can of meat and potatoes with his can opener and proceeded to dig his fingers into the goop. He took the dead man’s chocolate bars and cigarettes and looked for a place to sit. Finding no patch of dry ground in the dense, muddy woods, he plopped himself atop the dead German and ate his meal.
• • •
Saford made it back to his outfit, just as it was being pulled off the line and sent to Elsenborn, Belgium, to recuperate. The Go-Devils had been badly mauled during the initial phase of fighting that autumn. Now it was time for other American divisions to dive into the Hürtgen meat grinder.
On December 16, 1944, the Germans launched a surprise counterattack that smashed the Americans’ V and VIII Corps and created the infamous bulge in the Allied lines. Voluminous books have been written about the Battle of the Bulge—and this ain’t one of them. Those historic last two weeks of December 1944 have been studied extensively and chronicled exhaustively by scholars whose work I cannot supplement, other than to say that, just as on D-Day, Saford Hall was almost there. The Ninth was called to reinforce the bulging lines and stand against further German attacks to the north. The Ninth’s regiments held at Monschau and the Elsenborn ridge. The Germans attacked again, but they were spent. The Allies closed in and trapped the beaten Nazi foot soldiers in January, cracking the seemingly impenetrable Siegfried Line at last.
By February, the Go-Devils were on the march. In their path lay German-guarded dams along the Roer River. Past them was the mighty Rhine. If they crossed the Rhine, they would win the war.
Four months had passed since the Ninth had first attempted to take the Roer’s dams. Frozen in place during the winter stalemate, the division’s advance thawed in February, and by month’s end all three dams along the Roer were in Allied hands.
The crossing of the Roer, however, had not occurred. The Germans had succeeded in blasting the floodgates of two dams before losing control, which raised the Roer’s level a good ten feet. Engineers could not lay the cables necessary for bridge construction across the raging river. Boats were swamped by the violent currents. At one point, somebody rigged a crossbow-like weapon and fired cables over the river to the opposite side. To make matters worse, German sh
ells were still falling uncomfortably close for all those stationed along the riverbank. Something needed to be done quickly.
And that’s how Saford got picked to swim across the Roer River.
Several men swam with cables draped around their bodies. Not all made it across. Saford, who had paddled through the brackish waters of Morocco when this whole mess had started more than two years before, slipped into a wet suit that he hoped would protect him from the icy waters of the angry Roer. He rigged the cable around his waist and waded out into the river with another soldier.
Saford paddled heroically against the current, which pushed him downstream with a force of fifteen miles an hour. He kicked and stroked, the cable adding even more resistance to his suicidal swim, until he could see the riverbank on the other side and then feel the rocky river bottom with his feet. He pushed himself against the current and fell to his hands and knees on muddy ground, gasping for oxygen as if he had just run ten marathons. He had made it.
The other man had not.
Saford Hall swam across the Roer River with a cable tied to his waist. I still can’t get over that. The Saford Hall I knew was sickly, with weak lungs and bad eyesight. He wasn’t even allowed to drive a car the last ten years of his life. He was sweet and meek, an old man who played the fiddle and told corny jokes and sang “I’m Back in the Saddle Again” to the delight of lifelong friends and fans. He did not swim across ice-cold raging rivers beneath rocket-filled night skies. He did not shoot pistols at Nazis at close range or slit men’s throats or relieve a dead soldier of his last meal and eat it atop another dead man. Not the Saford I knew.
Which is to say I never really knew Saford at all. Even when he told me these war stories, I still viewed him as my cute little great-uncle who fought World War II like all the other cute little men of his generation—like Papa Clayton, for instance. Maybe it was because he didn’t tell me everything, just those well-rehearsed adventure tales that he punctuated with a hillbilly cackle, which always seemed to lighten the gravity of the stories.